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LEGO®
Lego (trademarked in capitals as LEGO) is a popular line of construction toys manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colorful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the pieces used to make other objects. The toys were originally designed in the 1940s in Denmark[1] and have achieved an international appeal, with an extensive subculture that supports Lego movies, games, competitions, and five Lego themed amusement parks.The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (7 April 1891 – 11 March 1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932.[2] In 1934, his company came to be called "LEGO", from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play-well". It expanded to producing plastic toys in 1947.[2] In 1949 Lego began producing the now famous interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". These bricks were based largely on the patent[3] of Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which were released in the United Kingdom in 1947. LEGO modified the design of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample given to it by the British supplier of aninjection-molding machine that the company had purchased.[4] The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate,[4] were a development of traditional stackable wooden blocks that locked together by means of several round studs on top and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they required extraordinary effort to be separated. The Lego Group's motto is det bedste er ikke for godt which means roughly 'only the best is good enough' (more literally 'the best is never too good').[2] This motto was created by Ole Kirk to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly.[2] The motto is still used within the company today. The use of plastic for toy manufacture was not highly regarded by retailers and consumers of the time.[citation needed] Many of the Lego Group's shipments were returned after poor sales; it was thought that plastic toys could never replace wooden ones.[citation needed] By 1954, Christiansen's son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group. It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that struck the idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the immense potential in LEGO bricks to become a system for creative play but the bricks still had some problems from a technical standpoint: their locking ability was limited and they were not very versatile. In 1958, the modern brick design was developed but it took another five years to find the right material for it, ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) polymer.[4] The modern Lego brick was patented at 1:58 P.M. on 28 January 1958;[5] bricks from that year are still compatible with current bricks.